Initially developed for basic digital media management, Digital Asset Management (DAM) has evolved into so much more than a simple storage solution. DAM has become a cornerstone for businesses of all sizes and industries in the digital era, increasing both creative and operational efficiency.
Today, DAM includes advanced features that are propelling marketing and creative teams forward to drive brand growth- including AI, cloud computing, and enhanced search functionality.
We’re diving into the seven innovative digital asset management features to elevate your brand and how top-notch marketing and creative teams are already using them and achieving results.
- What is digital asset management?
- Why digital asset management is important for marketing and creative teams
- The top 7 innovative digital asset management features to elevate your brand:
- Branded portal
- AI Visual Search
- Quick & Easy Asset Upload
- AI Auto Tagging
- Real-Time Workflow
- Content Analytics
- Advanced Permissions
What is a Digital Asset Management System?
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is a software solution that helps brands organize, manage, and distribute digital assets.
What is a digital asset? A digital asset is any media file type that has been created or stored electronically. Digital assets usually fall into one of the following categories:
Your DAM offers a centralized location where team members, clients, contractors, and other stakeholders can easily access all your digital media – from any connected device. 
This technology gives organizations control over their digital content, improving efficiency and protecting important brand assets.
Your digital asset management software should serve as a single source of truth, which helps your organization maintain brand consistency, increase productivity, and maximize ROI.
Branded Portal
A branded portal is a place where people outside your creative team can easily access your assets. It lets you adjust the portal’s logo, navigation color settings, and homepage image to remain consistent with your brand.
Top 5 Ways Marketing & Creative Teams Can Use Branded Portals
- Add a custom link to your main website so portal users can navigate easily between your visual media library and your official brand website.
- Create a featured public gallery to highlight photos and videos while they’re trending and steer your stakeholders toward the right content immediately.
- Build a form on your platform of choice and ask for whatever information you need from stakeholders. For example, you may just need their name and email so you can make them an Invited User, or you may want to ask for more information about why they want to use your images.
- Create a gallery of helpful materials so your visitors can easily navigate your portal (and follow your team’s rules and guidelines) from the first time they visit. Just add PDF help documents and any useful videos or screenshots to a public gallery, then add a custom link to the gallery in the navbar. You can also create a page on your main website that outlines how to use the portal and your usage rights policies.
- Add a link in your navigation bar to sign up for your newsletter to capture the email addresses of visitors engaging with your public portal. How? Add a custom navigation item and title it ‘Newsletter,’ then link it to your company’s email marketing signup page.
Branded Portal in Action: Kawasaki needed a customizable brand portal to deliver images to journalists and their editors. The team wanted their media library to be branded with Kawasaki’s logo, look and feel – not a technology partner’s.
“We needed to create skins and environments where it looked like us,” says Kawasaki’s European PR Manager Martin Lambert. Read the full case study.
AI Visual Search
Historically, the ROI of your content has been driven by your ability to put all your content into one central place.
In a perfect world, all of that content would be tagged to perfection. Everyone in your organization would be able to find what they need when they need it.
However, this is not reality. 40% of the 5+ billion assets housed on PhotoShelter are not being tagged, and it would take more than 200 days for people to tag all of the assets uploaded to PhotoShelter each month.
We talk to marketing professionals every day about the hurdles they face maximizing the value and the return on investment of their content. These were the biggest challenges we heard about:
- Difficulty finding the right image if you didn’t use really specific tags when you uploaded the file
- Spending countless hours searching for that perfect image – often coming up empty
- Lower ROI on older assets only using the ones that are the most easily accessible, or even worse, wasting money duplicating assets that already exist
- Manually plugging in metadata, keywords, and captions just to be able to find and use your images
- Additional training required for new employees, external vendors, etc. to know how to search your tags
How AI Visual Search Helps Marketing & Creative Teams
AI Visual Search allows you to search your entire library of assets for things that would be relevant in your search results based on visual descriptions, making it easier and faster to find what you need.
Now AI is doing the hard work for us with extreme specificity whenever you need it. That’s the beauty of machine learning. It has eliminated an extremely time-consuming and human, error-prone task. With AI Visual Search you can:
- Find your files easier. Language and image recognition provides you with intelligent matches.
- Increase the ROI of every asset. Search your entire library, regardless of how your content is tagged.
- Be more productive. Find assets in less time and spend more time on higher ROI work.
- Onboard faster and easier. New employees won’t need to learn a complex tagging system to find files.
AI Visual Search in Action: “People asked us for specific assets such as ‘photos of t-shirts being handed out’ for an event. Where would I even look? It’s not a metadata tag we would ever use. But when I typed “t-shirt” into AI Visual Search, it gave me dozens of results. Pretty incredible…That’s the power of AI. That’s what I think is really going to help us.” – Photo Manager, Brigham Young University | Read the case study
Quick & Easy Asset Upload
Efficiency in a DAM system isn’t merely about how quickly files can be uploaded; it’s also about how seamlessly the system fits into the organization’s content lifecycle. Different content types — from high-res images to bulk video files — might be better served by specific upload methods.
Upload Use Cases
Large File Uploads: The ability to upload large files without crashing or timing out can be invaluable for design teams dealing with bulky graphic files.
Mobile Content Creation: With mobile app upload capabilities, content like photos or videos captured on smartphones can be directly uploaded to the DAM system, which is particularly beneficial for on-the-go social media managers.
Remote Work Environments: Browser-based uploads can streamline the process for freelancers or remote workers who may not have access to a company’s internal networks or software.
Bulk Migrations: When moving assets from one system to another, bulk upload methods save time and preserve file structure and metadata, which are crucial during digital transitions.
AI Auto Tagging
If metadata turns your visual media library into an easily accessible arsenal of visual content, artificial intelligence puts that process into hyperdrive.
Here are the 4 ways auto tagging can help streamline your creative workflows:
ObjectID
ObjectID lets you add simple tags to every image in your library automatically. This tool is ideal for marketers and creatives who:
- Need to categorize a high volume of assets
- Have stakeholders that use keywords to search for content
- Spend too much time on metadata
ObjectID helps you:
- Auto-tag essential elements in your images
- Save countless hours on manual metadata entry
- Organize, find, and share images faster and easier
ObjectID in Action: “[ObjectID] was the answer to our prayers…Now, our various state agency partners can find specific images that will work for them and resonate best with their audience.” – Marketing and Creative Manager, The Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation
PlayerID
PlayerID lets you auto-tag everyone on your team – whether you can see their face or their number. This tool is ideal for marketers and creatives who:
- Manage content with athletes
- Need to get content to players fast
- Have fans who want more in-game content in real time
PlayerID helps you:
- Identify and tag your full lineup of athletes in real time
- Sync yourentire roster ahead of time to tag even faster
- Find photos to share social content with players in seconds
PlayerID in Action: “[PlayerID] will help us save hundreds of hours tagging and organizing photos, enabling us to share content with our partners, players, and fans faster than ever before.” – Former Director of Marketing, Premier Lacrosse League | Read the case study
LogoID
LogoID lets you identify your stakeholders’ logos automatically. This tool is great for marketers and creatives who:
- Work with various partners and sponsors or have multiple trademarks
- Need to demonstrate ROI to stakeholders
- Spend too much time organizing images for multiple brands
LogoID helps you:
- Identify logos and brand marks automatically
- Find and deliver event images to sponsors in real time
- Make auto-tagging easier.
LogoID in Action: “When our partnerships and commercial team shows images to current partners, they can quickly [identify] photos with their brand from that specific game. [We’re driving] significant millions [in revenue in partnerships today.]” – Media and Marketing Director, Burnley Football Club | Read the case study
PeopleID
PeopleID lets you identify and tag your org’s VIPs automatically. This tool is great for marketers and creatives who:
- Tag the same people in a high volume of images
- Need to keep track of titles and affiliations
- Find it hard to keep track of all the people you tag
PeopleID helps you:
- Auto-tag the most important people to your company
- Set who gets auto- tagged and when: you make the rules
- Add labels like job title and affiliation to stay organized
Real-Time Workflow
When your brand is hosting an event – whether that be a conference, music festival, meetup, baseball game or 5K race – your followers are already paying attention. Chances are they’re scrolling their newsfeeds looking for coverage, or even sharing content of their own. They will be most likely to engage with your brand’s posts if you ride that excitement and publish your best photos immediately.
That’s where Real-Time Workflow comes in. When you share photos instantly, you can meet your audience’s
demand for content and capitalize on their excitement.
The Benefits of Leveraging a Real-Time Workflow
Control your story
Being first means being able to lead the storyline on social media. The sooner you share the story, the more likely your fans will be to get their news straight from you.
Get the most ROI from every image
You’re capturing a huge number of images at every event or major milestone, but if you’re waiting to share them
in a recap the next day or in a monthly newsletter, you’re missing your best opportunities for engagement. Turning them around in real time and repurposing them in the future allows you to get more ROI from every image.
Publish photos that tell a better story
Sharing photos in real time gives them a longer shelf life. At a football game, photos of warm-ups are old news by kickoff. Sharing them instantly – while they’re still relevant – allows you to make use of photos that would otherwise go to waste. Plus, this allows you to provide new angles to your fans and tell a more well-rounded story.
Scale social content distribution
PhotoShelter integrates with social media content platforms such as Hootsuite, Slate, INFLCR, and more, allowing you to send content directly into the hands of your athletes, influencers, and stakeholders. Paired with PhotoShelter AI, content distribution can be seamless. Then, your influencers post your original content to their social media feeds, increasing the reach and ROI, as well as attracting a larger audience.
Beat out the competition and become the go-to place for content
If your fans know they can count on you for the best content, right when they want it, they’ll keep coming back
to your channels.
Cut out steps for your whole team
Any time you can have a positive impact on your audience and make life easier for your staff – it’s a win. Real-time storytelling streamlines your workflow and reduces your team’s workload after an event (when the last thing you want to do is edit and post photos until midnight).
Real-Time Workflow in Action: The New York Jets are powering the fastest photo workflow in sports. By pumping out images in real time, they’re delivering more images to fans and getting more ROI from every photo. Their goal is to become the go-to place for Jets content on social media.
Jets Senior Director of Content Strategy & Production, Dan Szpakowski, sends photos to the press box instantly after a big moment in the game. The team shares highlights from warm-ups, game action and post game in real time, telling a comprehensive, compelling story.
The Jets’ Instagram growth rate has skyrocketed 380%. The digital and social media teams
attribute this staggering increase to multiple factors, including renewed fan excitement, as well as the speedy and consistent distribution of high quality photos.
“The more volume we can put out, the more eyeballs we’re bringing to our account and the more followers we gain. And that’s what makes this whole operation run.” – Former Director of Digital and Social Media, New York Jets | Read the case study
Content Analytics
Digital Asset Management Analytics
Digital asset management analytics help you better understand your brand’s content performance, so you can make more data-driven decisions about your marketing strategy and overall campaigns.
- Simplify content reporting. Gain insights into data like daily uploads and downloads, top search terms, search activity, and most popular images that you can compile into a simple, downloadable CSV.
- Hone your content strategy. Use data from PhotoShelter to fine-tune your approach to digital asset management. Plan future content based on what content performs best.
- Prove content ROI. Report on the results of your organization’s investment in content so you can get the resources you need to reinvest in your success.
Content Distribution Analytics
Content distribution analytics help you better understand how your content is performing beyond your brand channels.
- Track your content anywhere on social media. No matter who posts your content on any platform, you can still measure performance – even if they download, edit and post it directly to social media.
- Get valuable insights beyond your brand channels. Track how often your stakeholders are opening, downloading, and posting your content, who is the most/least active, and compare performance data, whether it’s by stakeholder, event, or year over year.
- Leverage data to expand your reach and drive results. Use tags to understand what content types are more popular and engage fans the most and send more of what’s working to your stakeholders to continue driving results.
Content Analytics in Action: “For my bosses, [success is measured with] analytics. It’s numbers. I literally just sent those stats over 2 days ago for a meeting today. I think in the last 6 months we’ve had like 30,000 downloads, which is really good for us, like we’re really happy with those numbers.” – Associate Director of Visual Media and Web Strategy, Texas A&M AgriLife | Read the case study
Advanced Permissions
Security features and advanced permissions are essential for protecting sensitive digital assets. DAM systems often include access controls, encryption, single sign-on (SSO), and other security measures to safeguard against unauthorized access or data breaches.
Advanced permissions in action: Chris Rakoczy, a staff photographer for Hartford HealthCare joined in 2015 as a contract photographer and transitioned to a full-time role. As the organization’s new Digital Asset Librarian, it was Chris’s responsibility to uncover what wasn’t working and how to fix it. He found a lack of organization and no easy way to collaborate and provide access to 37,000 people on the Hartford team. They were buried in requests and every asset took a long time to find and share.
“If we’re out at an event, and people have to wait for us to get back to our desks, find the thing they want, and send it, it could be too late for their needs,” says Chris.
PhotoShelter Workspaces helped Hartford HealthCare’s employees manage and collaborate on creative projects. HHC also uses PhotoShelter’s single sign-on (SSO) feature to streamline access and ensure security without having to send individual user invites. With the added benefit of unlimited invited users, any of HHC’s 37,000 colleagues can access its vast asset library.
Cloud-based access anywhere = work gets done. With PhotoShelter’s secure, reliable, owned network, Chris and his team can quickly log on from anywhere. That means HHC’s staff photographers can easily upload images to PhotoShelter and designers can quickly access the files they need to complete their work.
Permissions in Action: “Through PhotoShelter, we’ve been able to empower everybody in the organization to get what they need when they need it — and also discover things they didn’t know they needed. They can pull something down within a couple of minutes, versus probably hours or days,” says Chris. | Read the case study
Other key features to look for in a DAM
Other key DAM features to look for include:
- Search and filter capabilities: including advanced functionalities like AI-powered search
- File formats: Ability to upload a wide variety of file formats
- Metadata management
- Tagging: Automatically add metadata tags for people, brands, objects, etc. in an image
- Customization: Customizable metadata fields like SKU or event location
- Asset sharing and distribution: Internally, externally, and on social media platforms
- Workflows
- Automation: Set up automations that allow you to skip steps in your workflow
- Real-Time: Move assets from the camera to social media feeds, websites, sponsors or key influencers in real-time
- Collaboration tools: Share, comment on, approve, and download assets for creative projects without leaving the platform
- Version control: Easy tracking and management of different versions of assets
- User management and permissions: Access control to set different levels of permission for confidential, proprietary, or regulated assets
- Analytics and performance tracking tools: Insights and metrics such as daily downloads, search activity, and top search terms
- User interface and usability: User-friendly interface, even for non-tech-savvy team members
- Mobile app / on-the-go functionality
- Integrations with other platforms and tools (more on integrations with your martech stack below.)
There’s tons of DAM solutions out there – it can be hard to pick the right one.
Download our DAM buyer’s guide to help you decide.
Why PhotoShelter Is Your #1 Digital Asset Management Solution
PhotoShelter offers high-speed uploads, flexible file storage, and a lightning-fast network. Our AI-powered suite enables you to streamline workflows, automatically tag images, create accessible subtitles for videos, and demonstrate your ROI.
“We have a tremendous amount of assets. With the old server, people would either get frustrated and couldn’t find what they needed, or they would start using old assets. PhotoShelter has made it easier to keep what we want to be used at the forefront. The search feature is life-changing.” – Caitlyn Hernandez, Project Coordinator at Baptist Health
With PhotoShelter, you receive a sleek branded portal, advanced permissions that integrate with your brand’s existing tech stack, custom design templates, social media integrations, and real-time collaboration in Workspaces.
“PhotoShelter is our bread and butter. It’s what keeps us in business. It’s my lifeline to my people, my services here, my job. It’s how I push content out and show my results. It’s how we transfer our assets to our 5,000+ people.” – Sam Craft, Associate Director of Visual Media and Web Strategy, Texas A&M AgriLife
We know that you have spent a lot of time, money and effort building your tech stack, which is why PhotoShelter integrates with the tools you know and love. Connect PhotoShelter with Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Photo Mechanic, WordPress, Drupal, Canva, Hootsuite, Slack, and other popular apps. Migrate files from other solutions, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Lightroom, and Photo Mechanic.
With PhotoShelter’s social content distribution platform, brands are able to activate the social channels of all their stakeholders via automated content delivery and better understand how social content is performing across partner channels to exponentially expand their reach and drive more engagement.
By choosing PhotoShelter, you also receive the benefits of industry-leading security, unlimited invited users, flexible user permissions, one-on-one onboarding and a customer success team to ensure you get the most out of your platform. Trusted by thousands of brands like Wendy’s, Delta Air Lines, and the New York Jets, PhotoShelter is the digital asset management platform to power your brand growth.